ud that you
can't come to see us, Sylvia, and do be careful with your new toy. It
doesn't look much more substantial than a cloud to me. Benny, look
_out_!" For the wind had seized the sail and flapped it noisily before
it set firmly. The last words Sylvia caught were, "You are letting it
tip now. You know I don't like it, Benny."

Sylvia laughed as she sprang up the bank. Even in this brief visit she
had observed how habitually the uppermost thought in her aunt's mind
effervesced into speech, and she saw how natural had been Miss Martha's
lack of repression at Hotel Frisbie. She felt for Benny Merritt with
his nervous passenger, but her sympathy was wasted. When Miss Lacey
sailed alone with Benny she always kept up an intermittent stream of
directions and suggestions to which the boy paid not the slightest
attention.

"Doin' my best, Miss Marthy," he used to reply sometimes. "If ye say so
I'll stop and let ye get out and walk."

Each time the boat had to come about for a new tack, necessitating the
sail's passing over Miss Martha's head, the air was vibrant with her
small shrieks and louder suggestions; but to-day, every time they
settled down for the smooth run, a pensiveness fell upon her.

"The Mill Farm is looking real prosperous, Benny," she remarked during
one of these calms.

"I s'pose so," returned the boy. "More folks comin' to the islands
every summer. More folks to want their truck."

"Seems to me," observed Miss Martha, "I used to hear that things
weren't very pleasant between the mainland folks and the islanders."

"Used to be so. Hated each other, I've heard my father say, but sence
I've been a-growin' up things have changed. We've ben findin' out that
they wasn't all potato vines, and they've ben findin' out that we ain't
all fish scales. My father says Thinkright Johnson's at the bottom o'
the change."

"Thinkright's a good man," returned Miss Martha, and with that she fell
into pensive mood again until time for another acute moment of dodging
the sail and coming about.

To think that in those few hours Judge Trent should have come to take
such an interest in Sylvia. So her thoughts ran. Was it the girl's good
looks, or was it simply that twinges of the judge's conscience had
induced the wish to make the _amende honorable_, and that the gift of
the expensive boat was an effort to reinstate the giver in his own
eyes?

Something of an intimate nature must have passed between them. To what
co